Why We Ask the Wrong Questions After Something Hard Happens
The morning of my civil trial, I stood in front of my closet and worried about what to wear. Our attorney had given us guidance, professional with minimal jewelry, but I kept turning it over anyway. I knew the judge would look at me and form impressions. Research backs that worry up: how a victim dresses creates unconscious bias in courtrooms, which is part of why rape shield laws exist at all. Years after the assault, I was still answering a question no one should ever have been asking. What was she wearing?
You've seen the other questions. They show up in comment sections within minutes of any public story about sexual assault. Why was she there? Had she been drinking? Why didn't she scream? Why didn't she fight back? Why did she wait so long to report it?
Put those questions next to the ones we ask after other crimes, and the difference is hard to miss.
Why do we question sexual assault victims differently than victims of other crimes?
We treat sexual assault as the one crime where the victim has to prove they didn't invite it. If your house is broken into, nobody asks whether you really wanted to keep your TV. If someone is mugged on their way home, we don't ask what they were wearing or why they took that street. We ask if they're okay. Then we ask about the person who did it.
After my assault, the questions ran the other direction. The man who assaulted me never took the stand at our civil trial. His attorneys argued that his actions were "unintentional," that he'd had too much to drink and ended up in the wrong bedroom. The questions in that courtroom were not about what he did. They were about what might excuse it.
The criminal side was worse. The prosecutor's office declined to file charges because they said they couldn't prove intent. My husband asked the obvious question: if we had video, would that be enough? No, we were told, because video wouldn't show his motives. The question that decided everything was about what was inside another person's mind, and somehow the weight of that question kept landing on us.
Why do people ask these questions at all?
Mostly it's self-protection, not cruelty. If we can find the thing a victim did wrong, we can believe we would have done it right, and that this could never happen to us or to someone we love. The questions feel like analysis. They function like distance.
The most common version is what I think of as the shock-factor myth: "If that were me, I would have fought back." I said some version of that sentence myself, before that night. Movies teach us there's a script for danger and that strong people follow it. Then it happened to me, in my own home, and my brain did not work in any way I recognized. Freezing is one of the most common, well-documented responses the human body has to threat. The question "why didn't you fight" assumes a choice that, for many of us, was never on the table.
Does this only happen after sexual assault?
No. Sexual assault is where the pattern is most visible, but the wrong first questions follow almost anything hard. Someone shares that they're getting divorced and hears "did you see it coming?" Someone loses a job and gets "had you already been looking?" A diagnosis brings "do you smoke?" A parent admits their kid is struggling and gets a quiz about screen time. Each question sounds like concern. Each one quietly asks the hurting person to account for themselves.
The pattern shows up in smaller rooms, too. A coworker tears up in a meeting. A friend says more than she planned to over coffee. A neighbor mentions, almost in passing, that things at home are bad. Most of us will never take a police report, but all of us will eventually have someone hurting in front of us, and the instinct to gather facts arrives fast, because facts feel like help. They usually aren't. What that moment needs first is the same thing it needs after a crime: belief and company.
“The questions can wait. Most of them were never ours to ask anyway.”
What should the first response be instead?
Care. Before any question, a person who has just been through something terrible needs to know two things: that they're believed, and that they're not alone. The questions can wait. Most of them were never ours to ask anyway. They belong to investigators, and good investigators are trained to ask them carefully, at the right time, in the right way. I've spoken with cadets at the Central Missouri Police Academy about exactly this, and those conversations give me real hope. The people whose jobs actually require hard questions are learning to lead with care first. The rest of us have even less excuse.
Care doesn't require expertise. It sounds like "I believe you." It sounds like "I'm so sorry this happened." It sounds like "I'm here, and I'm staying." You don't have to fix someone to help them. Most of the time, you just have to believe them and stay.
The night I was assaulted, my husband sat with me on the bathroom floor while we waited for the police. He didn't ask me why, or how, or what I could have done differently. He held me while I cried, for as long as it took. He had no training and no script. He just understood, somehow, that the first thing I needed wasn't an answer. It was him, staying.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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